Come celebrate the launch of World Records: Volume 2 Ways of Organizing, edited by Jason Fox and Laliv Melamed and published by UnionDocs. World Records is a peer-reviewed documentary journal that brings together the voices of scholars, critics, makers, and curators who offer new and complex perspectives on documentary to challenge and extend its margins.

In Volume 2: Ways of Organizing, World Records explores how to broaden critical engagement with documentary cultures by considering together their logistical and aesthetic infrastructures. Inside of texts and out, organizing is about creating and concentrating power, something that both logistical and aesthetic forms make possible.

On the occasion of the launch, we host an esteemed panel of contributors who will restage a roundtable discussion from the latest volume entitled English Is Spoken Here / English is Broken Here: A Conversation about Film and Language with filmmakers and scholars Lynne Sachs (initiator), Jeanne Finley, Christopher Harris, Sky Hopinka, and Naeem Mohaiemen.

Lynne Sachs: Let us begin with the statement “English is spoken here.”

I’ve been thinking about what the implications of this pronouncement might be in terms of an anchoring of a singular language and the drowning of others. I decided to invite the four of you to discuss and complicate English’s ascendancy worldwide. In both subtle and overt ways, each of you has explored the impact and resonance of this dramatic shift in your own work. We are all moving image makers and, generally speaking, what bonds us together is our choice as art practitioners not to engage with the mainstream paradigm for making and distributing our time-based work. Our work circulates outside of industrial networks; and yet, the fact that we have chosen to use the English language as our primary mode of communication and route of circulation (even here!) places us squarely within the established order.

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Jeanne C. Finley works in film, video, photography, installation, internet, and socially engaged work to create hybrid documentary and expanded cinema projects. Her recent projects weave a discursive, cinematic fabric of narrative, documentary interviews, scientific evidence, and archival and original footage to investigate sites of transformation. The resulting films, installations, and social engagement projects employ collaborative processes with artists, scientists, audience members, and subjects.

Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, and Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable.

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays to research the intersection of Third World Internationalism and World Socialism, in the period of post-war decolonization. Despite underscoring a left tendency toward misrecognition of allies, a hope for a future international left, as an alternative to current silos of race and religion, is always a hope in the work.

Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances, and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics, and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project.

Jason Fox is a filmmaker and professor based in New York City. He has taught at Vassar College, Cooper Union and at CUNY Hunter College. As well, he has worked as a documentary programmer in conjunction with The American Museum of Natural History, The Flaherty Seminar, and Maysles Cinema, among others. He also serves on the Board of Organization for Visual Progression, an organization that partners with social justice organizations to provide training on using visual media in their advocacy efforts. He holds an MA from New York University and and MFA from CUNY Hunter College.

Laliv Melamed is a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. She holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and has worked extensively on the topic of home videos, militarization and the politics of non-fiction media. Her writings have most recently appeared in New Cinemas and American Anthropologist Review and the anthology Silence, Screen and Spectacle. She is the co-editor of the “Screen Memory” issue of International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. In addition to her academic work Melamed is a film curator and a programmer based in Tel Aviv. She works for DocAviv Film Festival and programmed for 48 m”m Film Festival, produced by the Israeli activist organization Zochrot. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Sovereign Intimacy: Commemorative Home Videos and the Politics of Loss.